Speaker
The speaker is the fictional sister of musician Elvis Presley, though the fiction is loosely based on reality: Presley did have a twin brother who died in infancy. This speaker is not a musician, but instead a nun, living in a convent. She spends her days praying and tending to a garden, and in many ways living a safe, nurturing lifestyle that is the opposite of her brother's risque, public-facing, ultimately self-destructive one. However, she is perhaps more similar to her brother than she is different from him. She shares his talent for dancing, his artistic impulses, his attention to music, and even his smile. She displays a blend of wistful longing—even envy—and pity for her brother, paying tribute to him by quoting his music subtly throughout the monologue.
Elvis
The Elvis evoked in this poem is a version of the real-life Elvis Presley, a larger-than-life figure for contemporary readers thanks to his fame and enormous impact on music. In some ways, the version of Elvis that we encounter in the poem is not so different from the one that the reading public already knows. Just as the real Elvis is distant and perceived through a haze of personal mythology, the poem's Elvis is described only through the mediating lens of his sister's memory. A few aspects of the singer's legacy are given particular prominence here—not only his songwriting, his dancing, and his charisma, but also his working-class Southern origins. Moreover, certain characteristics of his sister's serve to subtly highlight his own legacy—for instance, the speaker's taste for nurturing a garden simultaneously contrasts with Elvis's own untamed way of life and reflects his ability to cultivate and nurture new music.
